Synopsis

An unforgettable novel about love–and the first work of fiction by the author of the groundbreaking nonfiction bestseller In a Different Voice.

Kyra is an architect, involved in a project to design a new city. Andreas, a theater director, is staging an innovative production of the opera Tosca. Both have come through political upheaval and personal loss. Neither wants to fall in love. Yet when she asks him, “What is the opposite of losing?” and he says, “Finding,” it galvanizes a powerful attraction, and they risk opening themselves to love once again.

When their love affair leads to a shocking betrayal, Kyra’s fierce determination to see under the surface, to know what was true and real, brings her to Greta, a remarkable therapist. As the therapy itself repeats the themes of love and loss, Kyra challenges its structure, and the struggle that ensues between the two women opens the way to a larger understanding.

Passionate and revolutionary, KYRA is an exquisitely written love story, imbued with gentle humor. This is an extraordinary work of fiction by one of the most brilliant writers of our time.

From the Compact Disc edition.

Excerpt

Chapter One

What is the opposite of losing?

It was the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and we were playing chess. Felicia Blumenthal had invited the strays to her home on Francis Avenue—an old habit, hospitality to strangers, made urgent for her generation by the war. He was her cousin, “much removed,” she said, laughing, as she brought him over to where I was standing in the blue dining room balancing a plate of turkey, and when I asked him what he was thankful for, his eyes registered surprise and he said, “This,” meaning the lunch. He had come in from London the night before, he was leaving the next morning for Chicago. I had come from my studio wearing a long black skirt and white shirt. He stepped back and looked at me. “A flutist or an oboe player?” he asked. I had always wanted to play the oboe. He asked if I was cold, the dining room shaded on the north side of the house, Felicia too European to turn up the heat. We left our plates on the sideboard and crossed the hall into the living room, skirting the group standing around the fireplace —men in gray suits, a woman in a red sari—and gravitating instead to the sunny bay window. He sat on one antique blue-velvet chair, I sat on the other, the marble chessboard on the table between us.

I reached into the diagonal of sunlight, my hand momentarily translucent as I moved the white knight into position to capture the black bishop.

Andreas looked, saw, and moved his bishop away. The black bishop glided to safety, the inner recesses of black and white squares. Instead he would sacrifice a pawn: out of the many, this one.

“Your turn,” he said, looking up, his eyes blue-gray, the color of river stones.

My half brother, Anton, had taught me to play, long afternoons at the table in front of the high window looking out to the sea, his face grim. He was the child of our mother’s brief early marriage, the half in half brother a splinter under his skin. “Checkmate,” he would say, explaining that it came from the Arabic sha¯h ma¯t, meaning the king is dead. I said it meant he was her mate, the queen more elusive, more inventive, the one who moves freely in all directions. Who invented this game, I wondered, Andreas waiting. I touched the castle, its evenly chiseled turrets saying harmony, symmetry, even as its straight-line moves—up, down, across—concealed the darker purposes of alignment, the closing in of castle and knight on the unsuspecting (did she know, how did she know, why didn’t she know) queen.

Andreas leaned forward, the lines of his face deepening in concentration, and then he swept his queen across the board. “Check.”

The sun, horizontal now, ignited the yellow leaves on the maple tree outside the window.

He sat back, watching my face.

“Do you know how green your eyes are in this sun?” his voice quiet, as if to himself.

I looked at him, surprised, and at his hand at the edge of the board.

“What is the opposite of losing?” I asked him.

“Finding,” he said.

And so it began.

The next morning it snowed, unexpectedly. Huge flakes hung suspended in a yellow-gray haze, revealing the air, its density, and also gravity, as tumbling slowly and then for a moment resisting, they were pulled inexorably down. The leaves of late fall mingled with the snow of oncoming winter as I crossed the yard holding the university buildings apart, each building standing alone, discrete. This was Puritan New England. No touching, no leaning on one another. It was more or less how I’d been living since Simon was killed, my husband shot by my half brother. I stared at the buildings, stony like Anton’s face, memory rising, anger propelling me through the iron gates and out onto Quincy Street. The morning traffic was stalled, drivers peering through half-moons of windshield, marooned in their iron shells. I threaded my way between the cars, crossed Broadway, and headed for the concrete overhang of the Design School, my wet footsteps trailing me up the stairs to my office, where the phone was ringing.

“I found you,” the voice triumphant.

It took me a moment: “My chess partner,” I said, dropping my keys on the desk, my bag puddling on the floor beside me. Wasn’t he going to Chicago?

We had left Felicia’s together, he saying he wanted to walk, his legs still stiff from the overseas flight. He wanted to know how I knew Felicia, he wanted to know what I was doing. I told him I was an architect, working on a project to design a new city, on a small scale, on an island. It was something of an experiment, I said. He was trying to do operas in a new way, also on a small scale. He had trained as a conductor, was working mostly now as a director. The light faded across the river, the traffic picked up, people returning after the long weekend. We went into Harvard Square looking for coffee. Not much was open. We settled into the bar at Casablanca, at a table in the far corner, relieved to be out of the dankness that had set in with the end of the day.

We talked about our work, how we each were trying in our own way, he with operas, I with cities, to wrest a tradition into the unexpected, so people would actually see what they were seeing, hear what they were hearing. The island, Nashawena, off the coast of Massachusetts, was the site of my project. Richard Livingston, whose family owned it, had been taken by the idea that the structures people live in shape their lives. Andreas’s face lit up, his dark hair and black sweater accentuating the color in his cheeks. I couldn’t quite place him. Felicia was Viennese. He said he was Hungarian. Someone from the Lyric Opera had seen his production of Lulu in London, and he was on his way now to Chicago to meet with their board.

A loud noise from the kitchen. I jumped. I felt him watching me, puzzled. I looked around, no one seemed perturbed.

I told him I had been born on Cyprus, and except for university had lived there until the summer of ’75. I left at the beginning of the civil war, I said, if such a term makes sense.

He raised his eyebrows. It doesn’t, he said. He knew about war, he said.

Suddenly it was late. We ordered steak sandwiches from the bar menu.

Finally I said, “I really have to go.” I stood up and reached for my coat. He stood as well. “It’s been . . .” I began. Our eyes met. “Let’s leave it there,” he said softly, his long face creasing into a smile, then shadowed by a look of concern.

“I’ll be fine,” I said. He didn’t know that a woman professor had been murdered in Longfellow Park, a few blocks away. Or that a graduate student in anthropology was killed just around the corner, in her apartment on Mount Auburn Street, red ochre on her body suggesting a ritual slaying. But I was going in the opposite direction, and anyway, in my life it wasn’t the women who were slain.

I came back to the apartment, saw my face in the mirror, the flush on my cheeks, and said, “I’m not doing this.” I threw my clothes in the hamper, showered quickly, turned off the light, and closed my eyes.

“Where are you?” I asked now, peering through the horizontal pane of plate glass that in this office passed for a window. The snow fell thickly.

“I’m at the airport,” he said, “standing in a phone booth, calling you.”

I retrieved the new drawings from the clutter on my desk and rolled them into a tube, cradling the phone.

“All the flights have been canceled,” he said. “There is no way for me to get to Chicago in time for the meeting. So I was wondering. Do you want to play chess?”

Snow batted against the not-window. Who designed this Design School? A honeycomb of offices stretched out on either side of mine, the concrete walls radiating dampness. I had come in just to pick up the drawings, I was on my way to the island. I checked my watch: twenty to eight. I was wearing old jeans and a black sweater. I ran my fingers through my hair.

“Look,” I said, “I have to meet the surveyor on Martha’s Vineyard, and then we’re going to Nashawena, but why don’t you come. You can see the site, and then afterward, we can get oysters.” What was I thinking? But the answer is, I was thinking just that. He was intrigued by the project, he would like the adventure, I was sure he liked oysters. Why not?

I picked him up at the Aquarium stop on the Blue Line, he wearing a leather jacket, Italian loafers, and gray slacks, his bag slung over his shoulder. He was born in Budapest, had lived with rivers, studied in conservatories, a tall man at ease in his body, impervious to the weather. He threw his bag in the backseat and folded his long frame into the front. The smell of leather infused the car.

We drove south along the expressway, snow gusting against the windshield, erasing everything except a small stretch of road. The intimacy of the car was unsettling, lending a gravity to what had seemed a lighthearted adventure. I turned on the radio—Mozart in the morning. The slow movement of a piano concerto vied with the whirr of the defroster. Andreas took out his handkerchief and wiped the windshield. “Can you see?”

“Much better.” I found myself telling him my dream about driving blindly. In the dream, my eyes are literally shut, but my hands are on the steering wheel, my foot on the gas pedal, and the car is moving forward. I realize in the dream that this is wildly dangerous. I’m bound to hit something, kill someone. And yet nothing bad happens. The car moves ahead, the road goes uphill, the light is dim, sometimes it’s night. Farmhouses line the road. It’s somewhere in the country. I keep having this dream.

“Do you want to interpret it?” he asked, clearing the windshield again.

“Actually not.”

The news came on. Snow light, snow bright, first snow—I decide it’s a snow day, which made this all right.

We turned south onto Route 24 and then east on 25 heading toward the Cape, the sky lightening, gray arms of road surrounded by forest. As we approached the canal, the air became denser, snow drifting now through a haze of salt water, and then on the other side of the bridge the snow stopped.

Andreas took off his jacket and put it in back. I reached into my bag and retrieved an orange, handed it to him to peel.

“We had a lemon tree in our backyard,” I said. “It’s one of the things I miss about Cyprus, the taste of those lemons.”

He placed a section in my mouth, a burst of sweetness.

Tall trees lined the road like sentinels. Beneath them, smaller ash and beech still held their leaves, white-brown, the color that chocolate turns when it’s too hot, when it’s too cold. I could never remember. Mid-morning sun flooded the car. I unzipped my coat, Andreas holding it as I freed my arms from its sleeves. A strand of hair fell across my face. I pushed it back; I felt him watching me. And then we were there.

He took his jacket and his bag, leaving his briefcase in the car. “Do you think it’s safe?” he asked. I said sure.

We bought coffee in the lunchroom of the ferry and took it out on the deck as the boat headed through the channel into the Vineyard Sound. The line of the Cape receded to the left, the wind sweeping everything behind us. We rode in silence, standing at the rail.

As the string of islands appeared off to the right, he said, “Tell me about these islands.” I turned, my hair blowing across my face. “Or tell me,” his voice quiet, “is this as strange for you as it is for me?”

I didn’t want to put it into words, this feeling of being carried, like a riptide sweeping you out from the shore, and if you grow up by the sea, you know to let it take you, and then when its force subsides, you can swim back to safety.

“Do you know the Beckett novel,” he asked, seeing I could not respond, “where one character asks another, ‘Do you feel like singing?’ and the other says, ‘Not that I know of’?” I laughed, and we split the turkey sandwich that Felicia had insisted I take home with me, the rye bread, only slightly stale, rescuing the turkey from blandness.

Kevin was waiting at the dock in his red truck, his face impassive as I introduced Andreas. Kevin glanced at him, but he wanted to talk about site lines and wetlands, the new restrictions passed by the commission having necessitated changes in the plans. The three of us crowded into the front seat, the gearshift pressing on my left, Andreas’s leg on my right, my body registering his long bones, tensile muscles. I had grown up on Cyprus, where touching was commonplace. He was Hungarian. I rested my leg against his and talked with Kevin about the new location of the building at the north end of the site—an eddy where the design flowed back to the periphery. We stopped at his office, went over the wetland restrictions, examined the drawings to be sure they complied. Then we drove to Lake Tashmoo, where Frank, Kevin’s assistant, was waiting, tripods and flags loaded into the Boston Whaler for the trip across the Sound.

The harbor on Nashawena is on the north side, shallow, rocky, facing the Massachusetts coast. A strip of farmland lines the shore, rising sharply to pastures with low stubby growth, boulders laced with lichen, meandering stone walls. I tell Andreas the history, how the islands, once part of the mainland, were separated when the Ice Age receded, inhabited by the Wampanoags, members of the great Algonquin nation, who called them Nashanow, meaning between. In 1602, Bartholomew Gosnold sailed into the Vineyard Sound. He named them the Elizabeth Islands for Queen Elizabeth, although some claimed it was for his sister. These small islands were included in the territorial grant of the king to the Council of New England. When the Council dissolved, Thomas Mayhew bought them, along with Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. He paid two coats for Naushon, the island now owned by the Livingston family, who also own Nashawena and Pasque.

About Carol Gilligan

Carol Gilligan is a psychologist and writer who lives in New York City and in the Berkshires. Her ground-breaking book, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory’ and Women’s Development, has been translated into eighteen languages. With her students, she co-authored and co-edited four books on women’s psychology and girls’ development: Meeting at the Crossroads, Between Voice and Silence, Making Connections, and Women, Girls, and Psychotherapy: Reframing Resistance. At Harvard, where she was the first Graham Professor of Gender Studies, her award-winning research led to the founding of the university’s Center on Gender and Education. She is now University Professor at New York University.

Author Q&A

A Conversation with Carol Gilligan

Random House Reader’s Circle: Your book In a Different Voice broke new ground in how we think about gender, psychology, moral behavior. You held the first chair in gender studies at Harvard University. After such a high-profile academic career, why did you decide to write a novel? And tell us a bit about the transition.

Carol Gilligan: The idea for the novel came to me one Sunday morning when I was reading in The New York Times Book Review about a new translation of The Aeneid. The reviewer quoted the exquisite passage where Aeneas goes to the underworld in search of his father and comes upon Dido, “so forlorn.” He says to her, “I could not believe I would hurt you so terribly by going,” and this fascinated me: how an intelligent and sensitive man could not know how his action would affect someone he loved. And I also thought how crazy-making this is for a woman, when the reality of her experience–in this case, her experience of love–is suddenly called into question. I found myself imagining how this might play out in the modern world, and then the characters of Kyra and Andreas came to me. I wanted to write the story from her perspective, but in the end, I also wanted to enter his voice and hear how he would talk about the experience.

RHRC: You say that you were fascinated with exploring the tragic love story of The Aeneid. How did this interest begin?

CG: I’ve been intrigued by The Aeneid since we read it in high school. My Latin teacher was in love with Aeneas, which I found puzzling given what happened to Dido. When my sons were in high school and reading Virgil, I sat in on some of their Latin classes. They had an amazing teacher–Polly Chatfield–whose brother was a classics scholar, and she led me to a book and an article that changed my understanding of what Virgil was doing. I had seen him as telling a story of heroism and tragic love, but I realized he was also showing us the costs of an armored heroism, for Aeneas himself as well as for everyone around him.The part I found most moving was the love story, and that’s also where the poetry is most beautiful. Infelix Dido, unlucky Dido, Virgil says, but in the end, Aeneas is the more troubling character. So what happens when a woman who is building a new city falls in love with a man who is carrying an old history, what happens to her and to him? These became the questions of the novel.

RHRC: To what extent, if any, did your academic research influence the novel?

CG: I don’t think my academic research influenced the novel, although there is a connection. I mean, I’m one person and I’ve written both. The connection I see comes from my interest in how people live, the stories they tell about themselves and their lives. In my academic writing, I draw on people’s voices to convey their experiences, and this may be one reason that work has resonated so widely. In fiction, I was not bound by tape recordings. I could imagine characters whose lives intrigued me. And the oddest experience in writing fiction is when characters appear whom you have not anticipated–like Roya, the Iranian architect, who just showed up one day with her spiky hair and silver bracelets, and also Sid, Kyra’s architect friend from New York. They arrived with distinctive voices and personalities.

RHRC: The therapist character–Greta–is interesting because she inspires us to look at the formal structures of relationships in our society. At what point in thinking about the novel did you decide that you needed this character in order to tell the full story of Kyra?

CG: Greta came to me slowly; it took me awhile to see her clearly and to hear her voice. When I started writing the novel, I knew that Kyra would not kill herself like Virgil’s Dido does when Aeneas leaves her; being a modern woman, she would end up in therapy. But how to write therapy sessions in a way that would be interesting seemed daunting at first. Then I became intrigued by Greta’s response to Kyra when she questions the structure of the therapy relationship. How would Greta feel and think about that? Once I got into the interplay between the two women, the therapy scenes between them started to flow.

RHRC: Your characters fall into prescribed roles as lovers, as professionals, as artists, and then they break out of those roles in the course of the novel. Describe this dynamic and why you chose to reinterpret a classical, tragic love story.

CG: I’ve always been captivated by tragic love stories, and I found myself wondering why. There’s a certain structure, a certain inevitability to these stories that I’ve always resisted. And the “what if” question led me into writing such a story. In the novel, Kyra and Andreas play a game called change the ending; I’ve always been intrigued by how people can resist fate. For Kyra and Andreas, it’s an enormous risk to love again after what each has been through. What would lead them to take this risk in the face of the losses they have suffered? My husband calls the novel a love story for grown-ups, and it is–it’s about a love between two people who have experienced loss, who have come through a tragic history– the history of Europe in the twentieth century–and who find themselves suddenly and unexpectedly in love again. When I began the novel, I didn’t know how the story would end.

RHRC: You say you were fascinated by how intelligent, sensitive people like Kyra and Andreas could be so irrational in matters of love. Why does love make us crazy?

CG: I don’t think love makes us crazy. What makes us crazy is when we experience love–when we feel that depth of connection with another person–and then something happens to call the reality of that experience into question. That’s what’s crazy-making, and Kyra’s questions are: Was what she experienced with Andreas true? Was it real, what she thought and felt? And what can she trust or believe in? Roya says that love is “the revolutionary emotion,” the emotion that allows things to turn. But for Kyra and Andreas, it’s a huge risk to open themselves in this way again.

RHRC: Do you think, in today’s society, we still suffer from conventional roles in relationships even though the context of love and work has changed for many people?

CG: Today’s society reflects the huge changes that occurred in the 1960s and ’70s, and what I see is that we’ve reached a kind of turning point or crossroads with respect to men’s lives and women’s lives and relationships. Some people want to go back to the 1950s, to the way things were then, which I remember, and some, including me, want to go forward toward a deeper realization of what true freedom entails, where both men and women can love and work freely and participate equally as citizens in a democratic society. In Kyra, the backdrop of history is very alive. Kyra and Andreas have lived through some of the most terrible history of the twentieth century. Both are inventive people, both are working in the world to bring about change. I was interested in that and also in their struggle to liberate themselves emotionally from a kind of captivity to the past. There’s a point in the novel when Anna, Kyra’s sister, says that the past is the best predictor of the future, and then she adds, “To believe that [is] to commit oneself to doom.”

RHRC: What does fiction give us that nonfiction can’t?

CG: Fiction gave me a freedom that nonfiction doesn’t have– a freedom to explore with fewer constraints, or maybe different constraints. To rely on imagination rather than on the kind of evidence you build on in doing research. Fiction allowed me to explore questions that interest me–questions about love and about psychotherapy–without having to resolve those questions or speak from a position of expertise. I loved writing the novel, living in that world with those characters, even though there were times when I found it deeply challenging. I had to free something in myself to do it, but in the end, it was easier for me than academic writing. More pleasurable. I felt I could draw on more parts of myself and also on a wider range of language.

“Both a thought-provoking polemic and a love story.” —New York Times Book Review

“An enthralling novel, tender, scary, and compelling. It crackles with a fierce intelligence and keeps the reader mesmerized throughout.”—Maggie Scarf

“Ambitious . . . full of lyrical passages.”—Los Angeles Times

“The pleasures of this novel are many indeed. . . . Readers will find themselves haunted by [Kyra’s] clear call to push against the boundaries of their lives. Love is a risk that is always worth taking, Gilligan reminds us.”—New Orleans Times-Picayune

Discussion Questions

Discussion Guides

1. Kyra says, “I don’t think you can fall in love with a man unless you fall in love with his work.” Does Andreas have to fall in love with Kyra’s work?

2. Kyra tells Anna that with Andreas she feels a freedom she has never felt with a man before. Andreas’s feelings for Kyra are also new (“I love you in a way I have never loved anyone before”). Does the strength of their feelings also, paradoxically, explain some of their reluctance to become involved with each other?

3. In their conversation about love, Kyra, Anna, and Roya each say things that surprise them. Did anything they said surprise you?

4. From the beginning, Greta intuits that in cutting herself Kyra was seeking emotional integrity. How do you understand the cutting scene? Do you believe Kyra when she says that she did not want to die but to cut through the surface to see what was real?

5. After Kyra reads the letter from her mother, Greta says, “So you know what love is.” Does this change your understanding of Kyra’s responses to Andreas?

6. Referring to therapy, Greta says, “You can’t do this work without love.” How do you think about love in the context of a therapy relationship?

7. As an architect, Kyra is guided by the vision that to change the way people live, you have to change the structures they live in. When she casts her eye on the structure of therapy, Greta takes her concerns to heart, coming to see that people need to feel free to challenge structures that are not of their own making. At one time or another, most of the characters in the story wrestle with this question. Does this issue come up in your life?

8. When Kyra hesitates to break her vow and open herself to Andreas, Anna encourages her to do so. Why do you think she does this?

9. What do Andreas’s letters to Kyra tell you about him?

10. Abe, Andreas’s father, plays a key role in the life of Jesse, Andreas’s son. What do you make of this three-generational family? At critical points, both Jessie and Abe express their feelings for Kyra to Andreas. Do you see it as a strength in Andreas that he allows himself to be moved by what they say?

11. When he returns to Budapest, Andreas realizes that “what loyalty meant was no longer simple.” How does his understanding of loyalty change, and how does this alter his response to Kyra and also to his work?

12. Do you imagine the relationship between Kyra and Andreas continuing? How do you envision their future? How would you resolve the issues of love and work raised in the novel? When Andreas tells Kyra, “I want to be with you,” and then thinks how difficult this would be to arrange, can you see a good way for them to arrange it?

13. What function do dreams play in this story? Why do Kyra and Greta decide to begin their post-therapy relationship by writing each other their dreams? Do you imagine their relationship continuing? What form do you think it might take?

14. In her letter to Greta, Kyra writes, “What’s always said about my work is that I saturate my buildings with natural light. I think of Louis Kahn, ‘the shadow belongs to the light.’ ” Does this apply to the novel as a whole?

15. The characters in this story love to think; they give lectures, go to faculty meetings, direct operas, design cities, talk about paintings, and are passionately engaged with their projects. The history of Europe in the twentieth century has played a central role in their lives. What is the relationship between their experiences as survivors of huge historical traumas and their passion for their work and for each other?

16. The action of the story takes place on three islands– Nashawena, Cyprus, and Bardsey–as well as in the urban centers of Cambridge, Budapest, and Vienna. Do the mood and action of the story on the islands differ from those in the cities? Does being on an island affect how the characters see and feel?

17. From the opening scene at Felicia’s to the midnight supper on Bardsey, food is a recurring theme. What does this tell you about the characters and their way of living in the world?